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How Do I Prioritize Keywords For My Search Campaign?

By Jeff Shi on December 11th, 2009

in Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off

As I have covered in my previous article, we now know of the 4 types of keywords which we can include into our campaign. However, our advertising budgets are limited, and thus we would not be able to select all the keywords which we would want for our campaign.

Let’s say you need to list out keywords for your Search campaign. How do we go about selecting them? One method which many Search Marketers use is known as the “Portfolio Approach”, where Brand and General keywords are selected, with the objective is to drive the most sales while achieving a metric goal, e.g. the number of visitors.

The “Portfolio Approach”

Lets say you are doing a campaign for a brand, CT Computers. For the Portfolio Approach, you would need to prioritize your keywords in the following manner:

By prioritizing your keywords in this manner, clicks for your brand related keywords will be maximised. As those searching for your brand keywords would be closer to the purchasing stage compared to others, the chances of them leading to purchasing your product would be much higher.

Next, your budget is now focused on the users searching for your product category in general, but with a purchasing intent. Targeting these users would enable you to still target relevant users, and still achieve potential sales.

Lastly, targeting on general keywords would then help you in increasing the relevant traffic to your site.

The following graph explains on what we can achieve by selecting our keywords in this manner:

By prioritizing our Brand keywords and potentially increasing our revenue, we will then be able to reinvest some of our returns into General keywords. This would then increase in the level of traffic and our branding, which will eventually convert some of these users to prefer our brand, and eventually go on to make a sale. We can then eventually reinvest some of our returns back into General keywords for branding purposes. If all goes well, this cycle continues ;)